


Ghosts

by DaydreamersMedicine



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 03:37:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8694889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaydreamersMedicine/pseuds/DaydreamersMedicine
Summary: Normandy Crash Site DLC+ Post-Horizon angst during ME2.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another fic I've decided to dust off and post. Angst fic because I wish there had been slightly more closure for female Shepard after horizon, and I adore wallowing in angst. Originally written on an iTouch during high school math classes, finally published (for better or worse).

"Commander Shepard?" Kelly tentatively tapped the Commander on the shoulder. Her brilliant green eyes were dull with exhaustion; her short jet-black hair was messy from her combing her fingers through it.

She hadn’t said anything, but everyone already knew what had happened on Horizon. A former squad mate of Shepard’s was investigating the colony for the Alliance…and it was plain that he and Shepard had more history than simply being on the same squad. Their confrontation had been… _heated_ to say the least. Joker and Garrus had filled Kelly in on Shepard and Kaidan’s history while the Commander had stormed up to her quarters.

"Yes, Kelly?" She asked with infinite patience. 

"There's a message at your private terminal."

"It can wait." She sighed.

"I know that! but...um..."

"Speak freely." Shepard encouraged. Kelly bit her lip, Shepard was a very understanding commander, even when she was in a bad mood. It was one of the reasons she felt so comfortable around her.

"It's Alliance.” She admitted. “Thought you'd want to know. It's from an...Admiral Hackett." Shepard's eyes widened a fraction. She'd always had a great respect for the admiral. And he had always believed in her during her entire time serving the Alliance. Admiral Hackett was one of the very few people she considered wholly good and trusted, especially now with all the insanity as of late.

"Thank you for telling me, I'll read it in my quarters." Kelly nodded respectfully and got back to her duties. Shepard turned and returned to her cabin for the night. Before going to bed, she opened up her inbox and read the email.

 

_[From: Admiral Hackett_

_Commander Shepard:_

_Our scans in the Amada system have turned up something we thought you should see: the final location of the wreckage of the SSV Normandy._

_We thought this news might be important to you, but we also have an ulterior motive. The Alliance would like to honor the Normandy with a monument, to be built on the site of the ship's final resting place. We'd like to invite you to place the monument and be the first to walk on the site._

_There are still 20 crew members unaccounted for from the attack on the Normandy. If you find any signs of these lost crewman, we ask that you report to the Alliance so that those heroes' families might find some closure._

_Godspeed to you, Commander.]_

 

She leaned back in her seat. The old Normandy. Her own personal graveyard, so to speak. It might give her some closure of her own, since Kaidan had been less than friendly to her at Horizon. She sent an intercom to the bridge.

"Joker." 

"Evening, Commander." Came the usual jovial voice of her pilot. 

"Set a course for the Amada system in the morning." His voice turned serious. 

"...Sure thing. Get some rest, Shepard. Things have been rough all over." She smiled at the concern in his voice. God, she was lucky to have him on her side. They had been through a lot together, and many more adventures would await them still. 

"Good night, Joker. Shepard out." He probably had some idea what she wanted there, he would know the system they were attacked, where she had...died. That was still weird to think about. She threw off the Cerberus uniform and crawled under the sheets, too tired to make any other bedtime preparations. The cabin really was a luxurious comfort compared to the old Normandy. A pang of sadness went through her as she remembered a certain night she had enjoyed very much in her old cabin. She would trade this luxury comfort for Kaidan's reassuring presence in a heartbeat. Her fist curled around the blanket and she bit her lip. A subdued sob worked its way out. 

Kaidan. Even the _thought_ of his name almost brought tears to her eyes. 

Kaidan Alenko. 

_'I'm useless.'_ Shepard thought, frustrated. _'Crying over him, did he cry over me?'_ She missed him... His hostility toward her on Horizon had hurt her a lot more than she had let on to the crew. She had to be strong, she had to be 'Commander _Freaking_ Shepard' and save them all; that was why Cerberus resurrected her in the first place. She sighed. Nobody had _asked_ her if she wanted to save the galaxy, she'd do what she could, of course, but she was just one woman. Just a single, human girl, the universe had decided to place its trust in. 

Kaidan was the only person who had ever realized that. Best of humanity? First human Specter? A Systems Alliance N7 Commander? None of those titles were who Jane Shepard actually was. Life had handed her one disaster after another, and because she was still standing upright afterward, people assumed she must be great, a survivor, a legend, strong, brave, a hero... Even after she finally fell, they wouldn't allow her to rest now that she had somehow proven herself in the eyes of the galaxy. She sighed and closed her eyes. Nothing would come of it, she just had to push onwards. Like she always had before. Like she always would. 

\----------------------------------------

"....Shepard?" Joker asked as she walked to the airlock. She was alone. 

"Let me out. I'll radio when I want to come back."

"...Understood..." He said, he knew she wanted space, and he knew how sacred the old Normandy was to her. Allowing the Cerberus operatives, or strangers, to walk with her seemed... Disrespectful somehow. Garrus had expressed that he didn't want to go, and Joker was needed on board. Besides. Shepard wanted to go out alone. This was something she needed to do. 

She descended in the shuttle, sealing her suit and walking out onto the snowy planet. Her boots crunched in the snow as she walked around. All around her was the torn and decayed wreckage of the old Normandy. Something glittered in the snow. She picked it up, brushing the snow and dust carefully off the dog tags. She pocketed them, someone would be happy to know for sure. She had to find the rest of the dog tags from the crash site to account for the roughly twenty crew members not found. She also had to place the monument. She walked among the quiet wreckage.

She saw the side of the Normandy. It reminded her of seeing the old ship docked in the Citadel. She blinked back a nostalgic sort of pain in her chest and walked on. She found the old Mako, and remembered how many times she had taken her squad down in it. It still looked pretty much intact, aside from being frozen in the snow and broken down from the passage of time. It almost made her laugh at its position stuck in the snow. The stupid old thing had gotten stuck quite often on their missions. Kaidan—she mentally winced at his mention—and Liara would often express mild horror at being taken down in the ‘death trap’ of a machine. Wrex seemed to enjoy bouncing around in the ground vehicle almost as much as she did. She continued her slow journey through the wreckage, and her memories. She passed a crashed escape shuttle, and moved on toward what looked like a piece of the old CIC. She paused. 

That was the galaxy map, wasn't it? She hardly recognized it with the wires and stairs twisted into burnt metal, but she could see part of the area around it, there was no pilot's chair up front, that had been torn away and landed somewhere else. She stopped and looked around. Oh, how many times she had stood just here, right before and after missions. The briefing room was nowhere to be seen. Something caught her eye, a datapad. She knelt and picked it up, wiping the snow from the screen. It turned on and glowed faintly, most of the data was corrupted. 

It was Navigator Pressley's. Shepard's heart twisted. She had heard he had been killed in the attack. What she could make out was somewhat familiar to her. A journal entry about his unease with the aliens Shepard had recruited for their mission. But as she scrolled through, the tone of the entries changed, he admitted that the non-human crew members were decent, good at their jobs. There was a bit more corrupted data, and then she saw the last entry. 

He said it was the best crew he'd ever served with, that he would trust his life with the very 'aliens' he had been so wary of. They weren't 'aliens' or 'nonhumans' anymore; they were people to him, good people, people he trusted.

Shepard blinked back the tears in her eyes, unable to wipe them from under her helmet. She knew Pressly's attitude toward her extraterrestrial squad-mates had changed, but the true extent of how much faith he had in her, and in them, at the time of his death moved her. She shook her head to dislodge the droplets and sighed. She put down the datapad, it didn't seem right taking it, there also didn't seem to be much point to it. With heavy feet, and a heavy heart, she continued. Something small and round stopped her on a ridge. With a jolt she realized it was her own N7 helmet. Dried blood on the inside alluded to her death. She took it. It was still her's, technically. She didn't have any of her original armor pieces, and she was going to return the dog tags she had found to the Alliance. But this was _her's_.

After searching about for more dog tags in the snow, she crossed back toward where she had come from and found the pilot's chair and airlock. She remembered being impatient while the Normandy's scanners decontaminated her and her squad, and Joker wisecracking at them to pass the time. How the first time she was in the pilot's area on the way to the Citadel, how she had been filled with an innocent sort of wonder at seeing the space station. Seeing the surface of the planets she arrived on. Seeing the galaxy. More tears threatened her eyes. She moved past the sleeper pods, she never used them anyway, but it was still nostalgic, the sleeper pods had been in the main living area of the ship, next to the lockers, her cabin and the mess, where she and every member of her squad had shared memories... She picked up another fallen dog tag and moved on to the last part of the ship. It was the mess hall. She had heard the members of her squad living at the time of the Normandy's demise were still alive.

But one member had already been lost before the Battle of the Citadel had even begun. On Virmire, Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams had been killed just days before the final battle with Saren. It had been a harsh blow to their team, Ashley was one their best fighters, nobody had expected what had occurred at Virmire. It had torn Shepard up, she had made the call, she could only save one of her crew members: Kaidan, arming the nuclear device that destroyed Saren's base, or Ashley, holding off the Geth in the tower with the Salarian task force. The split-second decision had fallen to her. She imagined life without Ashely, it was hell. There would be an empty void where the good-natured solider had once stood. Then, she imagined life without Kaidan… 

She made her choice. The guilt afterward had been maddening, she couldn't help but wonder if her judgment had been compromised. Kaidan was her second-in-command, but she also had feelings for him. Feelings that were very against the Alliance regulations. When Shepard remembered Kaidan holding her as they flew toward Ilos, she had believed she had made the choice she could live with. But she still wished she could have saved Ashley... 

She decided to place the monument here, where it meant the most to her. The life of the Normandy had been the life of her crew, so she honored Ashley, and the fallen crew of the Normandy, by placing it where they had spent their fondest memories on the ship. She stared at the broken mess hall for a long time, listening to the wind howl through it. Memories intertwined with the scenes in front of her. Ashley was dead. Saren was dead. The Reapers were still out there. So many had died already, and more would die before this ended. Shepard allowed herself to grieve the losses, as the only living soul on the forsaken planet. When she was ready to show a brave face to her crew, she finally stood up. Ashley had loved poetry, though she'd never admit it openly for fear of ruining her badass image, Shepard wished she could have known some to send her off with. Instead she saluted the area, muttering a small prayer under her breath, despite not being religious herself, Ashley would have appreciated it.

She stood up and walked back to the shuttle. When the airlock sealed she tore off her helmet and allowed her emotions to overtake her. By the time the shuttle docked, Shepard was sitting quietly, calmly, her expression blank and clear of emotion. She was holding her old N7 helmet in her lap, a bag full of dog tags sat on the bench next to her. Joker was waiting for her. 

"Commander..." Shepard didn't say anything. She just handed him the dog tags and turned to the elevator. Nobody met her eye as she passed. Nobody breathed a word until the elevator was moving away from the CIC.

No more missions were taken for the day.

Shepard sighed and sat down at her desk, holding her head in her hands. She knew the door was locked, but she still didn’t want to cry. Cerberus probably bugged her room anyway, that’d be a _great_ moral booster, seeing the supposedly fearless Commander Shepard, whom they spent _billions_ of credits on to bring back from the dead, just breaking down in her room and sobbing like a wreck. Besides, she had finished her crying in the shuttle on the way. From the corner of her eye, was the picture of Kaidan she kept. The thought of Horizon hit her again, and she stifled a sob trying to force its way out. She pulled up her terminal, Kelly hadn’t mentioned if there was any new messages for her, being respectfully quiet when she noticed Shepard’s mood, but she figured Hackett would get some sort of notice that she finished finding the tags.

There were two messages.

The first was from Admiral Hackett, as expected.

_[From: Admiral Hackett  
Commander Shepard:_

_  
The Alliance was grateful to receive the information you found at the Normandy's crash site, and we've sent it out to the affected families. By finding those dog tags, you provided peace of mind for a lot of people, Commander. I thank you on their behalf.]_

The second message had no sender, just a subject line. ‘About Horizon…’ She knew who it was from. She wasn’t sure she wanted to read it. Kaidan, the Kaidan she had once known, wasn’t the kind of person who would send a message just to piss her off. She double-checked the locked doors, steeled herself, and opened the message.

_[Shepard,_  
  
I'm sorry for what I said back on Horizon.]

She breathed a silent sigh of relief. At least he didn’t completely hate her…She hoped.

_[I spent two years pulling myself back together after you went down with the Normandy. It took me a long time to get over my guilt for surviving and move on.]_

Now _she_ felt bad. She hadn’t even seen his own pain at her return, only selfishly wanting things to go back to the way they were two years ago. She tried to imagine what it would be like going to his funeral, and then having him show up a year later in a Cerberus uniform. She would feel shocked, angry, betrayed…

_[I'd finally let my friends talk me into going out for drinks with a doctor on the Citadel. Nothing serious, but trying to let myself have a life again, you know?]_

She wanted to blame him, but she couldn’t. She had been _dead_. She had no right to expect anyone or anything to wait for her. It was just like he told her before Ilos, ‘The galaxy will just keep going…’she forced back the memory before it became painful. She was happy he could move on, though. Maybe she could find some closure in this letter. __  
  
[Then I saw you, and everything pulled hard to port. You were standing in front of me, but you were with Cerberus. I guess I really don't know who either of us is anymore.]

That stung. It made sense, but it still hurt. Two years can change a lot. Two years was the time between her home on Mindoir being burned down and joining the Alliance, a little more than two years was the time between her joining the Alliance and being the sole survivor of Akuze. She understood how two years can change a person into someone you can’t even recognize. But she was still the same, stopped in time, while everyone else moved forward.

_[Do you even remember that night before Ilos? That night meant everything to me... maybe it meant as much to you. But a lot has changed in the last two years and I can't just put that aside.]_

Of course she remembered, that night had been perfect, for once, everything in the galaxy just _made sense_. For once, she didn’t have to hide, didn’t have to be strong. For once…for the first time…she had actually fallen in love. She hugged the picture frame to her chest and closed her eyes. Screw what Cerberus thought. She sighed. _Two years._ The words floated back into her head. It didn’t seem possible. But she had to accept it. __  
  
[But please be careful. I've watched too many people close to me die -- on Eden Prime, on Virmire, on Horizon, on the Normandy. I couldn't bear it if I lost you again.] 

Her heart twisted. She filled in the names he didn’t mention. Corporal Richard L. Jenkins a young marine, full of hopes and potential, shot down by a Geth within mere minutes of them landing on Eden Prime—a senseless waste of life. Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams, the smart-mouthed solider who was always at her side, until the painful choice at Virmire ended her life. The colonists and soldiers she didn’t know on Horizon, taken by the Collectors she was still powerless to stop. Navigator Pressly, the crewmembers lost in the attack on the Normandy and… _Herself_.

_[If you're still the woman I remember I know you'll find a way to stop these Collector attacks. But Cerberus is too dangerous to be trusted. Watch yourself.]_

She smiled. Kaidan was faithful and optimistic as always, while still showing his concern for her. He was always more concerned for her safety than he thought he let on. She had heard Doctor Chakwas chasing him off more than once while recovering from various injuries in the med bay, of course, she wasn’t much better herself. The only difference is that Chakwas had a much harder time chasing off the _commander_ than she did the lieutenant. __  
  
[When things settle down a little... maybe... I don't know. Just take care.  
  
\--Kaidan]

She sighed and sat back. She could almost see him writing and rewriting that last line, she could almost _hear_ him say it. She wondered idly if the Alliance had monitored this message, or if he somehow got Anderson or someone to send it privately. Oh well, it wasn’t as if she was going to get in trouble for fraternization at this point, and Kaidan was an excellent solider, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to lock him up. Besides, he couldn’t be kicked out, just reassigned. It didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter to anyone but her and Kaidan. Hope fluttered on the single word _‘maybe…’_ it wasn’t as if he had said they’d never be together again, although at this point nothing short of a miracle would let her back into the Alliance, much less his squad.

_A miracle—or a sudden Reaper invasion._ She thought darkly. They’d bring her back if that happened, though she prayed to any deity willing to listen that it wouldn’t. Oh well, first thing was first, survive the suicide mission, and take care of the task at hand. She turned off the lights and fell into her bed. Tomorrow, there would be no outward sign that this happened, she would go back to acting normal. She’d dealt with Horizon, and with the old _Normandy_ , she couldn’t let the ghosts haunt her forever.

She had a galaxy to save.


End file.
